Web Services and ASP.NET MVC

You could use the new HttpClient class that is built into .NET 4.0 to consume RESTful web services. For example let's suppose that you wanted to return the current fuel prices (http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ws/rest/fuelprices).

Start by designing a model that will map the XML that this service is returning:

[DataContract(Name = "fuelPrices", Namespace = "")]
public class FuelPrices
{
    [DataMember(Name = "cng")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal Cng { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "diesel")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal Diesel { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "e85")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal E85 { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "electric")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal Electric { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "lpg")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal Lpg { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "midgrade")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal MidGrade { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "premium")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal Premium { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "regular")]
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")]
    public decimal Regular { get; set; }
}

then you could have a controller that will query the remote REST service and bind the result to the model:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        using (var client = new HttpClient())
        {
            var url = "http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ws/rest/fuelprices";
            var response = client.GetAsync(url).Result;
            response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
            FuelPrices fuelPrices = response.Content.ReadAsAsync<FuelPrices>().Result;
            return View(fuelPrices);
        }
    }
}

and finally a view to display the results:

@model FuelPrices

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>CNG</th>
            <th>Diesel</th>
            <th>E 85</th>
            <th>Electric</th>
            <th>LPG</th>
            <th>Mid grade</th>
            <th>Premium</th>
            <th>Regular</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Cng)</td>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Diesel)</td>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.E85)</td>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Electric)</td>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Lpg)</td>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.MidGrade)</td>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Premium)</td>
            <td>@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Regular)</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>